Welcome to the Neighborhood: The Locavore Variety Store, 434 Sixth Avenue
Today we welcome a new small business to our neighborhoods — help us welcome the next. Tell us which new independent store in Greenwich Village, the East Village, or NoHo you’re excited about by emailing us at info@villagepreservation.org.
As advocates for local small business, we find great satisfaction in hearing of new independent establishments opening in our neighborhoods. These arrivals give us hope that reports of the death of mom-and-pops have been greatly exaggerated. Whenever such occasions present themselves, we like to share our enthusiasm with the world in the hopes that others will join us in wishing our new neighbors a warm welcome, and more tangibly, patronize and spread the word to help ensure their success and survival.
Imagine living in a neighborhood a short walk away from independent-owned specialty and variety stores that sell most things that you might be looking for. As it happens, if you live in New York, and certainly if you live in our neighborhoods, there’s no need to imagine. You already do. Today, we “welcome to the neighborhood” a business conceived almost expressly to drive that point home. The Locavore Variety Store (434 Sixth Avenue, at 10th Street) offers an exciting selection of everyday goods and specialty items, all manufactured within 100 miles of its address. But beyond that, it is an engine for the promotion of localist lifestyles and a resource for those committed to the idea that conscientious consumer choices can improve the world around them. This makes it that rare place where you can buy a pack of Big League Chew and leave feeling good about it.
Every pencil tells a story. That is the insight that led Caroline Weaver down a rabbit hole during her university years. The many, subtle variations among pencils reflect a range of historical, cultural, political, and ecological differences among their places of origin. Fascinated by the complex backstories of these simple utilitarian tools, Caroline decided, upon moving to New York, that a store devoted exclusively to pencils was just what this town was missing. And she was right! So she opened CW Pencil Enterprise, a beautiful specialty store on the Lower East Side that, from 2014 to 2021, offered its lucky customers all things pencil. (Learn more here — really.)
The COVID-19 pandemic posed tremendous challenges for small businesses, Caroline’s included. In doing so, it also brought public attention to local stores and to their vulnerability. Caroline noticed, however, that this awareness did not entail much knowledge of the economic and social contributions of local business, nor did it even ensure familiarity with the independent establishments in the area. And she couldn’t blame them. Once shoppers got past the small handful of shops buzzing on Instagram, they ended up more often than not ensnared in an algorithmic morass. Caroline decided to tackle this problem by cataloguing on foot every independent small business in the city. Once she closed her store, that became her full-time occupation.
Caroline walked the city for two years. At that point, she had covered 85% of neighborhoods, catalogued 14,000 businesses, and was ready to share her results. She did so through the Locavore website, which launched in 2013, to great enthusiasm among the few who knew about it. Vetted, comprehensive, and powered by people instead of search engines, the site allows you to filter businesses by neighborhood and product category. It also offers a membership that comes with access to a shopping hotline that you can call once a week for personal advice on finding elusive items.
The limited diffusion of the site neither surprised nor frustrated Caroline. As a business owner, she had long been aware of the difficulties of bringing attention to online resources in a saturated digital landscape. As a result, she had always envisioned the website as the first in a three step project that would also include a guidebook and a store. The book, The Locavore Guide to Shopping NYC, which Caroline published to widespread acclaim, sacrifices comprehensiveness in favor of curatorial expertise. It’s revised every year and features over 600 uniquely New York stores that reflect their owners’ passion for what they do. We can think of a few more fun ways of getting to know a neighborhood. (You can find your copy at most independent bookstores and about 60 other stores, just not at Amazon).
The Locavore Guide has succeeded in exposing readers to great independent stores beyond the iconic ones that everyone would know about through Instagram or otherwise. But it is through the Locavore Variety Store that Caroline has been showing visitors how engaging shopping locally can be. From its modest space, Locavore offers an eclectic assortment of things you need and of things you want. The selection began as an outgrowth of Caroline’s own localist shopping habits, but has since grown to the degree that the more popular categories of locally-produced merchandise have expanded. The store caters to the diverse mix of customers that led Caroline to locate her store in Greenwich Village to begin with: long time residents, newcomers, tourists, students, workers, and so on. Consequently, you can find there everything from staples to souvenirs, gifts, and surprises. This rewards browsing with unexpected discoveries. So we invite you to experience the store for yourself. But to tide you over while you get there, we share a few highlights from our visit:
Comestibles, including Borgatti’s pasta from the Bronx!
Postcards with drawings from the Joel Holland Storefronts series (our September, 2024 Business of the Month featured below.)
A duster, made from the plumage of a very soft-feathered animal.
Old-fashioned adhesive for making your candles stick to your candleholders.
A toy not made in China(!) but manufactured out of recycled wood-dust from a local manufacturer and 3-D printed into attractive, demountable vehicles!
Pickles!
A locally-produced alternative to Drano that does not corrode your pipes (because it’s potassium-hydroxide-based).
Cherry-wood-made spoons from Kempton, PA.
A great collection of books about New York, New York businesses, and localism (e.g., Seltzertopia, a book on the history of Seltzer by one of the co-curators of the Brooklyn seltzer museum!)
Subway mosaic trivets, far more hygienic than putting your dishes on the subway floor!
And, lest we forget, Big League Chew (not pictured), made in upstate New York and, trust us, still the best way to pass off your chewing gum habit for a chewing tobacco one.
We invite you to swing by the Locavore Variety Store, welcome Caroline to the neighborhood, and take a moment to experience what will surely be a crash course on the beauty, benefits, and precariousness of local small businesses. As Caroline eloquently puts it:
My only goal is to keep promoting, not just the fact that these places exist, but all the reasons why they’re so important. People move so fast when you live in the city that it’s easy to pass through your life and not even take a moment to realize that these places could all be gone in a second and that they’re all kind of hanging on by a thread.
But as a consumer and a neighbor, you can make a difference!
If you would like us to welcome another independent business to the neighborhood, please let us know at info@villagepreservation.org.